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The RSS (Remote Sensing Systems of Santa Rosa, CA) Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU) lower troposphere global temperature anomaly data for March 2009 was published yesterday and has dropped after peaking in January. The change from April with a value of 0.202°C to May’s 0.09°C is a (∆T) of -0.112°C.
Recent RSS anomalies
2008 10 0.181
2008 11 0.216
2008 12 0.174
2009 01 0.322
2009 02 0.230
2009 03 0.172
2009 04 0.202
2009 05 0.090
RSS (Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa)
The RSS data is here (RSS Data Version 3.2)
Oddly, a divergence developed in the Feb 09 data between RSS and UAH, and opposite in direction to boot. UAH was 0.347 and RSS was 0.230
I spoke with Dr. Roy Spencer at the ICCC09 conference (3/10) and asked him about the data divergence.
Here is what he had to say:
“I believe it has to do with the differences in how diurnal variation is tracked and adjusted for.” he said. I noted that Feburary was a month with large diurnal variations.
For that reason, UAH has been using data from the AQUA satellite MSU, and RSS to my knowledge does not, and makes an adjustment to account for it. I believe our data [UAH] is probably closer to the true anomaly temperature, and if I’m right, we’ll see the two datasets converge again when the diurnal variations are minimized.”
It certainly looks like the data sets are converging now, with a scant difference in May of .047°C and that Dr. Spencer was right.
Holly cow!!!
I lived in Fargo, ND for a very long time, have family all over North Dakota. Just so you know, Dickinson (proper spelling) is in the west central part of the state, considered to be the HOT, DRY portion of the state. They typically do not get a lot (compared to eastern part of the state) of snow, and are most definitely hotter in the summer than Fargo or even the Bismark/Mandan area during summer.
I must say, I am astonished that they are getting snow this late in the year. AGW aside, people should genuinely be concerned about events like this, as this is the breadbasket of the world. Crops don’t grow very well in snow! And from what I am hearing from friends and family, the opening of this years growing season isn’t looking very strong. Guess there will be less corn ethanol this year eh? Not to mention food!
tallbloke (05:51:06) :
“The Essex and Kent cricket match in Colchester was interrupted, while the match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton was called off after 2.5cm (1in) of snow settled on the outfield.”
I remember it well, I drove to Buxton that morning and was planning to attend the match in the afternoon (Derbyshire didn’t play very often at Buxton). It was a chilly frosty morning but I was rather surprised to come out of the lab at lunchtime to see it snowing heavily! Interestingly two weeks or so later we were in a heat wave and the start of a 2 year drought.
Jimmy Haigh (20:19:01) :
Ron de Haan (17:18:29) :
Snow in the UK?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1191089/Its-June–snowing-From-sweltering-shivering-just-week-happen-great-British-summer.html
When I was 15, it snowed in the UK on the 2nd June 1975. That was the first time I had seen snow in June. I never saw it again until June/July 2007.
I saw it again in June/July 2008. It has happened again in 2009! Is it only me, or is there a pattern emerging?…
Jimmy, it’s weather, which is climate in the making.
Mike D. (22:06:28) :
Dr. Svalgaard, with all due respect, re defining “theory”. […]
Neither of those definitions uses the word “truth.”
I did not not mean to say that the theory is the ‘truth’, but said explicitly that the observations were. Observations are true [unless fake or manipulated – which we should not call ‘observations’ in the first place] within the uncertainty stated for them. So the theory is a shorthand for the truth that lie in the observations.
Bob Tisdale:
Thanks for that info. I will try charting that and see what it gives. I had some reservations about comparing a bmp chart with a chart from data so I’ll try to see how they compare if I use the info you have given me.
FatBigot (21:44:56) :
Rest assured that I do not spend all my time burrowing under curves. Having 65 acres of property, still finishing a house, returning to work on a part time basis (I’m “retired”), reading history, politics, astronomy etc and having a wife with a honey do list the length of both my arms (and how loves fishing in remote places) – I have plenty to do.
As I recall from my BSc mathematics courses, taking the area under a curve is a method of integration. Useful when there is no equation you can integrate. My “integrations” seem to reveal interesting things perhaps.
For example: The suns “activity” (as show by the TSI charts, a proxy for the sun’s activity) has increased from the 17th century and the 20th has had the most activity. Whether this activity has a great influence on global temperatures is under dispute.
Also, this method of analysis shows that the first 50 years of the 20th century are the same as the last 50 years in terms of activity (in total).
This method also shows that volcanic activity in terms of DVI was much greater in the 19th century than the 20th and the 20th’s activity has been minimal and less the 18th and 19th. Again likely to have an influence on temperature. I’m not making any claims here, just makes me wonder.
If you are a retired mathematician or something and think this method has no merit say so and tell me why so I can get on with all the other interesting things there are to do. :]
‘Veritas est adequatio rei intellectus’–truth is the conformation of thought to a state-of-affairs, as St Thomas Aquinas saith. I have never found as better definition of truth than that.
Well, well, and I can confirm that we are getting a warmer than average June at the moment in central Greece. Seems there is no democracy in the division of summer heat :).
Of course a theory can be either true or false. The 18th c. theory of the chemistry of combustion involved a posited substance called ‘phlogiston’. Priestly and Lavoisier exploded that consensus with their description of the chemical reactions involving oxygen. In the 19th, the standard theory of the propagation of light posited a medium, ‘ether’, through which electromagnetic waves traveled. Einstein gave this thoretical construct the boot.
Arthur Glass (11:49:40) :
Of course a theory can be either true or false.
It seems that people around here can’t read. The truth is not about the theory, but about the data. The data is the truth the theory has to explain. This explanation itself is neither true nor false. It is a useful theory if it allows predictions of not yet observed values and those predictions come out correctly within the bounds of observational error. The phlogiston theory was useful when it was proposed, because it explained observed facts. When further facts [the truth] became available, the theory failed, as will [probably] all theories eventually.
Actually I think it was Michelson & Morely who gave the concept of the ether the boot.
Kindest Regards
Leif
What I find fascinating about theories is that, even though they can be supplanted by another they can still be useful.
For example, I believe that Newton’s theory of gravitation is all that is required to land a probe on Mars or to go to Pluto. However, GPS would not work without Einstein’s theory of relativity.
a jones (12:49:34) :
Actually I think it was Michelson & Morely who gave the concept of the ether the boot.
Not really. Einstein claimed that he did not know about that experiment and BTW the ether is very much alive today. It is called the ‘Higg’s Field’, and there are probably many ethers. As far as we know, all electrons have EXACTLY the same mass and charge. How is this possible? Because, so some modern thinking goes, there really is only ONE electron, or rather a single ‘electron field’ [ether, if you prefer the old word for it] permeating the Universe, and the ‘electrons’ we observe are just ‘excitations’ of that single ether.
“I can confirm that it has been raining all day in the south-west of England, with floods and power cuts due to lightning. My heating is on.”
In central MN, USA, May was a bit cool and the driest May since 1934, another year with PDO & AMO negative. March and April were dry as well. Today, 6/6, it is drizzling, grey in mid-fifties.
I also doubt we’ll see an official El Nino, likely no more than a few months in El Nino territory.
anna v (11:49:35) :
Well, well, and I can confirm that we are getting a warmer than average June at the moment in central Greece. Seems there is no democracy in the division of summer heat :).
I knew someone had stolen our share of heat but I always thought you were a good girl anna 😉
Steve Hempell (13:18:22) :
What I find fascinating about theories is that, even though they can be supplanted by another they can still be useful.
For example, I believe that Newton’s theory of gravitation is all that is required to land a probe on Mars or to go to Pluto. However, GPS would not work without Einstein’s theory of relativity.
And it’s likely Einsteins theory will either be supplanted or extended while remaining useful in some applications.
DaveE
A little late to comment, but here in New Orleans, we start wearing our seer sucker suits after Memorial Day, and go back to wool after Labor Day. That being said, temperature and humidity is summerlike here from mid April to mid October.
Has anyone here read Walter Isaacson’s fine biography of Einstein, published, I think, in 2006?
Dr Svalgaard. Isn’t the Higgs boson still an elusive beast? There is also the strange resuscitation of Einstein’s ‘great mistake’, the cosmological constant.
“The data is the truth the theory has to explain.”
Well, not if you are a philosopher in the analytic tradition of Frege and Russell, where truth is a characteristic not of states-of-affairs but of propositions, which are most clearly set out in the terms of symbolic logic. This is certainly not the position I would take. But I would insist that that ‘data’ are best characterized by being either accurate or inaccurate, not as being true or false.
Sensu stricto, the word ‘datum’, which means ‘given’, is misleading. The world does not present itself exclusively as a set of ‘givens’ passively received by an observer; rather, data have to be worked up out of ‘the booming, buzzing world’ of human experience (William James) by what the Aristotelean tradition calls the ‘active intellect’.
I feel an urge to introduce Husserl’s concept of noetic/noematic analysis, and urge the fulfillment of which I shall forego, I am sure to everyone’s relief.
Natural scientists have an unfortunate tendency to trespass, blundering on two left feet, into the territory of philosophy.
“It is a useful theory if it allows predictions of not yet observed values and those predictions come out correctly within the bounds of observational error.”
This reminds me of the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. Too utilitarian for my taste. I prefer Bohr-ing accounts, which require one to believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’, as Prof Dodgson, one of the pioneers of symbolic logic, puts it.
If I ever have to name a cat, I swear the name will be Schroedinger.
Arthur Glass (15:09:50) :
“The data is the truth the theory has to explain.”
Well, not if you are a philosopher in the analytic tradition of Frege and Russell, where truth is a characteristic not of states-of-affairs but of propositions,
None of this has anything to do with science or truth as such. In symbolic logic ‘truth’ is just another symbol: “T”. I can make a truth table for ‘logical AND’:
A B A&B
T T T
T F F
F T F
F F F
This is pure symbol manipulation, has nothing to do with real True or False.
Science has long ago left philosophers in the dust. Their philosophizing and problems are not relevant to science.
But I would insist that that ‘data’ are best characterized by being either accurate or inaccurate, not as being true or false.
Data is neither accurate nor inaccurate. With a stated uncertainty, the data just is and is a accurate as the uncertainty species, not in absolute terms. The data, to the stated accuracy, represent the real ‘truth’ about a phenomenon.
Arthur Glass (15:09:50) :
Isn’t the Higgs boson still an elusive beast? There is also the strange resuscitation of Einstein’s ‘great mistake’, the cosmological constant.
The Higgs has been elusive, but most physicists think it will be found soon [we shall see]. If not, we are left without an ‘explanation’ for mass. The cosmological constant is with us whether we like it or not. The main problem is that its value [as deduced from observations – truth, you know 🙂 ] is so VERY VERY far from its expected value showing us that some new physics is lurking somewhere.
“Cuccu, cuccu, well singes thu, cuccu”
When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding-a-ding
the truth that lie
Hmmmm . . .
” data just is”
Depends upon what ‘is’ is, as that great philosopher Bill Clinton once said.
I’m much more impressed with Carl Poppers view on the Scientific Method, put up a hypothesis and it will stand till someone provides a better one to explain observed phenomina. Note “observed ” not a model !!
This is my last post on this thread, I promise.
Here was my original post:
“Well thanks be to God for that! Putting ‘theory’ before the collection of empirical observations is voodoo-do, not science.”
I can’t see how this sentence can be understood in any other way than as expressing the primacy of empirical observation and the working up of data therefrom as preliminary to any attempt to formulate an adequate synoptic theory. So I can’t see that I am in disagreement with Dr Svalgaard on the general subject of scientific method.
But then, maybe I am a poor reader. Too much indulgence in medieval Latin?
Dr. Svalgaard,
I stand corrected. I agree that the data — empirical observations and measurements — are all we really can trust, to the extent we can trust anything. Data are often measured with error, error aggregates when data are combined, averaged, filtered, etc., and some data and collections of data can not be entirely trusted a result. But we have nothing else to go by, except a healthy respect for uncertainty, in such cases.
Theories attempt to “explain” observed data and/or predict unobserved data. They are a different beast, and have utility only insofar as they are successful at explanation and/or prediction.
Models in particular have utility at either explanation or prediction, and often not both. At least in my field, biometrics, explanatory models are often useless at prediction, and skillful predictive models often make little or no attempt to explain.
What we face with AGW models is the attempt to combine the explanatory and predictive capabilities. I would argue that those models have failed at both purposes. I tend to agree with you, if I understand your point of view, that solar radiation models by themselves also have failed to explain or predict global temperature change, to the extent that global temperatures can even be measured without broad aggregated error.
We are thus left with squishy data, compounded uncertainty, and not much else. The question emerges: should we make extensive alterations in society and culture based on squishy data and compound uncertainty? Will those alterations do more harm than good? And lastly, what is the responsibility, toward society and culture, of scientists who are or should be aware of the problems with both the data and the theories?